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Comment by QuesnayJr | Hacker News Reader

Tarkovsky movies are boring, so I would ask someone if they minded boring movies before recommending him. It's just that lack-of-boringness is not the only axis by which to judge or enjoy a movie. I can put up with being bored for 2 hours if I get something else out of it. I don't think you need to like Tarkovsky -- I don't think you need to like anything -- but Tarkovsky is a good examples for the pleasures of cinema orthogonal to the boring-not-boring axis.

I like the way you put it about feeling the movie. When I try to picture what it was like to live in the Middle Ages, I usually end up picturing something like Andrei Rublev.

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To me a boring movie is one that is mostly a constant flux of extremely predictable events with near zero content to analyze (e.g. a Marvel superhero movie). Tarkovsky is nothing like that, in fact I think his movies are the exact opposite of that.

I didn't say I was necessarily bored. But most people find art movies boring, and Marvel movies exciting. I can try to get the world to adopt an idiosyncratic definition of "boring", or I can use words in their public meaning. Movies with easy-to-follow plots and lots of excitment are not boring. Dreamy movies with messages that can't be summarized in five messages are boring. Fine. But sometimes boring movies are still good.

"Boring" is a description of a thing's effects, not the thing itself. Tartovsky's movies are not boring for me, so I find your description completely inaccurate. There is nothing inherently boring in them, just things that don't appeal to all audiences. A lot of people might find them boring (and that's fine), but that's a description of their response, not the movie.

It's better to describe the movie as "slow", "having no action", or "driven by dialog and long scenes of nature", or, if you must, "a movie most people would find boring". These are objectively true.

Saying the movie is "boring" not objectively true. It is a subjective description.

What is your definition of boring? The concepts explored, for example, in Solaris and Stalker are far from boring. If you rely on a cliffhanger every 15 minutes, your taste might be boring to many cinephiles.

Yes, but there are many great film makers, whose work isn't generally considered 'boring', like much of David Lean, or Milos Forman's Amadeus.

I don't understand how you can read my comment as anything other than pro-Tarkovsky. I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek by calling them "boring". I hope the cinephiles of the world can someday forgive me.

The real tragedy is that in our hyper-attention-seeking society that calling a movie "boring" is such a terrible insult. A movie that is strategically boring defeats our expectations. Movie makers know what we're expecting, and when we're expecting it, and delaying or flouting the fulfillment of those expectations can be part of the movie-making art. It's been a long time since I've seen Solaris, but I just recently rewatched 2001, and that's a movie that definitely uses boringness strategically. It has long sequences that communicate how long it takes to get around space, so that when you finally get to the Discovery One you can feel how far away and isolated Bowman and Poole are.

I appreciated the idea of an intelligent planet. (But yeah, 2:47, mostly dialog? NOt so much.)

The soundtrack was in part created on a synthesizer (the ANS) heard in several AT films. Its tones are based on patterns drawn on glass. That part of the film survives (at 38m) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrF1PSoTN3A

How it worked: http://www.theremin.ru/archive/ans.htm

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